Issue 3 was my first issue of the Lady Mechanika series and while
there is the recap page at the very beginning, I still felt a bit
lost starting in on the story with this third issue. But with that
said, this issue was so pondering and full of blustery word balloons
it felt like I didn't need to catch up on the previous chapters
because I don't think anything really important happened this issue
regarding the overall story. I got the feeling I would need to read
the next issue just to see what this series is all about.

When I do reviews I don't pull punches, I don't play it nice because
I'm given free comics for review purposes. I tell you exactly what I
think after having read said comic. So having said that read and if
you want my honest opinion in a more fleshed out way...

What's obvious from this issue is that the main character Lady
Mechanika is searching for a companion/friend of hers a woman much
like herself, half machine/half human. She's somehow traced the
clues to a Gypsy Circus and a standard cheesy melodramatic comic
book misunderstanding battle between characters happens and after
the dust has settled and hands shook, the circus folk and Mechanika
figure out little as to the trail of her missing companion. So
Mechanika follows another trail leading directly to the big bad
character of the series (so I am assuming), a character by the name
of Blackpool. By the end of the issue Mechanika with her male
compatriot/assistant/inventor head into the big city intent on a
confrontation with Blackpool.

So
that's the gist of the story as far as I could tell. The story
overall as far as it affected me kinda sucked. Maybe because this
third issue was kind of a bridge issue or a middle part of the
story, but I was so very bored reading this issue. The first thing I
noticed was all the worthless dialogue. There were so many word
balloons. One thing thats so special about comics is that the art
can tell the story almost as much as the dialogue. A lot of current
writers just fill up a page with way too much dialogue or text. I
don't know why they do it, but I think the modern comic writer has
to understand that the art is what sells a comic first and most of
the time. Let it tell the story too rather than just adding
illustrations to the words. What's so bewildering or maybe not so
much, is that the writer is also the artist on the series. I've seen
this kind of occurence before where a person mostly known for his
art, as it is for this series (Joe Benitez), tends to kill his own
art with way too much dialogue. I don't know the psychological
reasons why this happens, but I've seen it before.

So
my advice to Mr. Benitez is chill with the dialogue, let your
beautiful art tell the story and your words fill in the important
details where its needed. After awhile I just stopped reading the
word balloons because it was just drowning me in an effluence of
pointless exposition. So I just looked at the art and while most of
the time I could still understand what was going on, there were
pages where it was just pretty pictures filling the pages around the
word balloons.

So
no, I have no interest in reading another issue of this series
despite the beautiful artwork. You may have a different opinion
about this issue, but that's how it goes. If you paid good money for
this comic I hope you liked it, but I am glad I got to read it for
free, I would have been very disappointed if I had paid for this comic
with my hard earned money.